In the rainforest, the rewards of silence sometimes exceed your wildest
expectations. From where I sit quietly, I don’t hear a single artificial
sound. Unseen cicadas shrill and set the air ringing, woodpeckers
cackle from the treetops, and frogs click and boom from the rock-pools
alongside the singing river below. From somewhere in the undergrowth, a
grey peacock-pheasant sounds an echoing, guttural laugh. In the distance
rise great grey cliffs, home of serow (a forest goat-antelope) and
bear, overlooking the rainforests where every morning the hoolock
gibbons still hoot and sing. Around the steep rock slope where I am
stretched out on my back, the looming rainforest envelops me like an
amphitheatre. I feel like a tiny flame steady in an evergreen sconce. As
yet, I have no inkling of what we are about to witness.